NORTH LAS VEGAS — By all accounts, Democrat Steven Horsford should be on a cakewalk to Washington in Nevada’s new 4th Congressional District.

The district’s demographics — 36,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, the highest percentage of minority voters — would seem to heavily favor the first African-American to serve as state Senate majority leader. Also, Horsford’s opponent is a three-time loser with a $17 million court judgment hanging over him for a land deal gone awry.

Nonetheless, Horsford is having trouble shoring up prominent black support and either runs even or trails his well-known challenger, Danny Tarkanian, in recent polls.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Just six months ago, Horsford was considered such a shoo-in he was asked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to help raise money for Democrats in tougher races. His own campaign website even boasts a January newspaper headline branding him a “sure thing.”

The race is now a tossup, threatening what the DCCC sees as a must-win if Democrats are to come close to regaining the House.

“It would be a very bad sign if a district that’s got a 13.5 percent Democratic advantage went Republican,” said Democratic strategist Billy Vassiliadis, a staunch Horsford supporter who urged him to run.

Vassiliadis and Horsford insist Tarkanian largely benefits from his famous surname. He’s the son of legendary University of Nevada Las Vegas basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian and Las Vegas City Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian, a Democrat whose ward overlaps slightly with the 4th District.

“Because of my opponent’s name, the fact that he’s run so many times and the fact that there’s $1.5 million in anonymous third-party money being poured in to basically try to buy a congressional seat, I’m not surprised at all,” Horsford told POLITICO at his campaign headquarters.

Yet name cachet didn’t close the deal for “Little Tark,” as he’s nicknamed, when he ran for Nevada secretary of state in 2006, state Senate in 2008 or U.S. Senate in 2010. In the last race, he tacked sharply to the right to compete — but ultimately lose to — tea party darling Sharron Angle. Angle lost to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

This go-round, though, Tarkanian has garnered support from a surprising quarter: Frank Hawkins, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A beloved former NFL star, Hawkins once represented the inner-city portion of the district on the Las Vegas City Council.

“Steven, in my opinion, has forgotten where he came from,” Hawkins, a Democrat, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “He has, in my opinion, almost turned his back on the community. He’s not ever seen in the community. If it was not for an election, I doubt he would be here.”

Such remarks undermine Horsford’s stated rationale for running. He movingly tells voters of his rise as a kid from the neighborhood who lost his father to gun violence and helped his single mother, a recovering drug addict, put him and his siblings through college.

The 39-year-old father of three was elected to the state Senate at 31 and instantly was celebrated as an up-and-coming minority. He’s CEO of the Culinary Training Academy, a partnership with Vegas resorts and the Culinary Local 226 to train future Strip hotel employees.

“I’m just trying to give back to the social system that helped educate me, support me and guide me,” he said. “I feel a sense of obligation to make things better.”

Still, he’s viewed with suspicion by some in his own community in part because his leadership role in the state Senate required he focus on many issues — mining taxes, gaming regulation — that don’t resonate with many poor minority voters, said Patricia Cunningham, who hosts a radio call-in show focused on minority issues.

Cunningham said there’s also some underlying irritation with Horsford among black residents because the Culinary Training Academy — formed in 1993 in the heart of the historic black neighborhood — is dominated by Hispanic students. The Hawkins endorsement, from which the NAACP distanced itself, caused an uproar.

“When Frank Hawkins came the morning after the primary and said he was going to endorse Danny and go door to door with him, that was a shock to a lot of people in the African-American community,” Cunningham said. “A lot of people were puzzled and offended by it, but it was quite the discussion in the community. And it was divisive because of his position.”

What’s more, Tarkanian is touting his own family’s long connections with the black community, including the lingering affection for his father’s history coaching black basketball players. Progressive groups attacked Tarkanian as racist for that line of reasoning, prompting Tarkanian to tell a GOP group, “We could be like Steven Horsford, who’s not doing anything with that community and, you know, pretend we’re black and maybe try to get some votes if that’s where it is.”

Tarkanian apologized for that remark, which doesn’t appear to have hurt him in part because of players coached by his father who went on to NBA prominence and are now campaigning for him. Cunningham said his family’s connections to the community — they’ve opened a basketball academy in the district — are real.

The Republican also believes he’s in contention because the district’s apparent Democratic edge may be deceiving. The district’s boundaries stretch from the inner city to the vast, rural northeastern areas where Democrats are more conservative and often vote Republican. Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, won the area that became the district by 6 percentage points in 2010.

It’s also an area of the state where Tarkanian has built up some sweat equity having run for office before.

“It’s very disappointing to lose a race, but I felt like each race I ran in I put in a good effort and gained something,” Tarkanian said. “I don’t think losing is an embarrassment. An embarrassment is when you quit, when you don’t try hard enough. … I was a big underdog and I made a race out of all of them.”

Horsford, on the other hand, is a new face beyond his state Senate borders and that is a handicap, UNLV political science professor David Damore said.

“It’s hard to get oxygen in this environment when you’re a state legislator and there’s a presidential and Senate race going on as well,” Damore said. “At this point, I think some people think Tarkanian is an incumbent, they know him so well. Horsford has run ads that remind people that he’s the Democrat in that race.”

Super PACs supporting Tarkanian spent the summer hammering Horsford for a series of missteps that included taking a lavish junket paid for by a poker website lobbying the Legislature and in 2010 sending a fundraising letter that promised donors access to top state lawmakers in exchange for donations.

“They’re things that I’m not going to sit here and defend because they don’t require a defense,” Horsford said. “What they require is recognition that I’ve learned, that I’ve taken responsibility.”

Horsford then slammed Tarkanian for a series of questionable business deals that caused him headaches in past races, as well as the $17 million judgment against him and his family by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for a land deal gone south.

Reid, in an act observers attributed to Democratic jitters about Horsford’s standing, held a news conference this week to blister Tarkanian over the judgment, which the family continues to fight in court.

Tarkanian called the line of attack and the high-profile messenger an “act of desperation.” He said his family was defrauded, and that suffering big losses in real estate isn’t especially novel to voters in a state with the nation’s highest foreclosure rate.

Cunningham believes Horsford will ultimately prevail not by negative campaigning but by laying out just how conservative Tarkanian is.

The candidate is out of sync with even his own mother’s politics. The popular councilwoman admitted, for instance, that it irks her that her son opposed using federal funds to beautify road medians in rundown areas of her City Council ward, one of her pet projects.

“He thinks [the government is] in debt and we should not be providing that,” Lois Tarkanian said. “I disagree.”